Reading has been around for thousands of years and as time has moved on the way people read has modernized from writing on walls to now printed books or e-books. Reading will never go away, the love for a good story will not just disappear. If anything I think people get more excited about certain books and series coming out because of technology. People share what they read on Goodreads, people await book launches on fan websites. There is a whole interactive medium where fans can relate to each other and talk about the books together. It is like a worldwide, online book club and your finger tips. There are books that are cool to be reading there are also books that you stumble upon like hidden gems and all through technology. Technology will not get rid of readers if anything I think people are reading more, however, they are reading different things and in different ways. If readers never leave neither will writers. As long as people keep reading, then people will keep wanting to write. This goes for publishing as well. In the book, Print is Dead the author cites five reasons why publishers will still exist in the digital age, despite the ability to self-publish. They are as listed:
1. To find talent in the thousands of books being published each year.
2. To continue the momentum behind the initial splash.
3. To edit the content and make it more than just another blog.4. To expose and market talent by creating a presence on the Internet.
5. To get the authors paid and handle the financial side of promoting.
No matter how digital our reading becomes, someone will always have to write the words we read and because of that, writers and publishers will always be needed for as long as there is reading and words.
I have always been the person to love going to the bookstore. I like the smell the feeling and I love buying books, but even I have bought e-books. When I was traveling around Europe this summer I had no room to carry a bunch of books, yet I had the luxury and time to read during my travels. As a result, I resorted to e-books. And I must admit there is a part of them that are very nice. E-books that I download on my phone are with me all the time. I can open it when I bored or riding the metro. I had access to them during lectures and presentations. I could read basically anywhere without physically carrying a book or having to set aside time to read the physical thing. I read 4 books that month that I wouldn't have read otherwise if it wasn't for e-books. No doubt there is a part of me that now wants to go buy all the actually bound versions of these books so I can line my shelves with the books I have read, but I did save money in buying the e-book versions and that is tempting enough in the first place to continue with e-books. We are at a turning point in the reading world, and although, print might be dead and reading might be digital, there is no death for the digital reader, writer, nor publisher.
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